As you all must know, there are only two types of
movies made in the UK now - dotty, whimsical comedies about eccentric
provincials and violent, dark comedies about London gangsters. This is type
2.

What's the oldest movie cliche in the book? I'm not
sure, but I think that when Edward Muybridge projected those first
flickering images in San Francisco in the 1870's, it must have
involved one criminal asking another criminal to come back for "one
last job".

Here we are again, 125 years later,
doing it all for the 733rd time. Ray Winstone plays a retired
mobster who is living the easy life in Spain, with good friends and a
wife he still loves. Unfortunately for Ray, when one is a former
criminal with specialized skills it is not easy to retire. Somewhere
back in London, you can bet your bottom shilling that some mob boss
wants to pull off the biggest job ever, and he really needs your
talent.

Mr Mob Boss needs to send someone to Spain to
persuade Ray to come back for that proverbial "one last job", and who
does he send but Gandhi. Gandhi has his ways of persuasion, as the
British found out so many years ago. First Gandhi threatens to eat
nothing until Ray participates. Then Gandhi threatens to eat a burger
until Ray participates. This escalates for a while until Gandhi
finally threatens to eat Ray's wife unless he participates. This last
threat definitely gets the Rayman's attention.

Here is a sample of the scintillating dialogue:

Gandhi: Are you doing the fucking job or aren't you?

Ray: No.

Gandhi: Yes

Ray: No

Gandhi: Yes

Ray: No

Gandhi: Yes

Ray: No

Gandhi: Yes

Ray: No

Gandhi: Yes

Ray: No, I won't

Gandhi: You will.

Ray: No, I won't

Gandhi: You will.

Ray: I won't

Gandhi: Yes, you will.

Ray: No

Gandhi: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. You will do this fucking
job.

I think at this point you guys probably think I'm
kidding or exaggerating. Wrong! Just to show you, I'm going to do the
next citation not by typing, but by capturing the frames with the sub-titles on. Here you
go:

And therein lies the sheer genius of it! How could
the academy have ignored this for best original screenplay?

Well it pretty much went on like that for a while,
until the Rayman realized that Gandhi was going to keep saying "No"
for another hour, so Ray and his friends shot and killed Gandhi. But
in a sense, the Great Soul was right - Ray did head up to London to do
the job, because he couldn't figure out how else to hide his
Gandhi-killing ways to the mob. If you look at it from Mr Mob Boss's
point of view, Gandhi really did the job. He was told to go to Spain
and do whatever it took to bring Ray in, and by golly that's just what
the l'il Mahatma did, albeit at the cost of his own life. Details,
details.

Mr Big Mob Boss, played by Lovejoy,
is sorta curious, however, about what happened to Gandhi, so he asks
Ray two or three hundred times, and Ray lies two or three hundred
times (see dialogue above, with minor alterations). Lovejoy knows Ray
is lying, but he doesn't really care because he didn't really like
Gandhi that much in the first place.

Then the movie moves on to the job that
Ray was recruited for, which Lovejoy has supposedly been planning for
six months. Now here's his master plan: there is an impregnable safety
deposit vault next to a steam bath. Lovejoy decides to drill in through
the steam area. There seems to be a loophole or two in his plan:

NUDITY REPORT

there is an orgy scene which features one woman's
breasts in close-up and several more in the distance

1. He drills in from a pool. He has all his men
underwater in scuba suits, drilling away at the wall of the pool,
which is adjacent to the bank. Now I ask you - if you had six months
to plan that heist, do you think you would have thought of draining
the pool first? By leaving the water in the pool, he not only makes it
impossible to work during the drilling, but all the men have to swim
to the loot after the wall collapses, and he also takes the risk of
short-circuiting his power supply.

2. They
don't even turn off the steam during the robbery, thus assuring that
they will be uncomfortable and have poor visibility.

3. After they hauled Ray in all the way from Spain, it
turns out that he brought no special skills to the robbery, and that
anyone could have done what he did.

4. Ray did
manage to keep some earrings for himself, separate from the main pile of
loot, which is just as good because Lovejoy only paid him ten quid plus
his life, which Ray was completely happy with, considering the
alternative. But what the hell will he do with distinctive, stolen,
diamond/ruby earrings? Will he fence them and risk implication and/or
loss of his cover as a retired businessman, or will he let his wife wear
them in public and thus prove he was involved in the caper?

Yup, that was some master planning all around!

87% of critics gave this a positive review. It's
hard to see why. Is it a comedy? Even its staunchest defenders concede
it isn't that funny. Is it a character study? Well, the characters
were all one-dimensional or totally undeveloped, and you saw the
dialogue above. Is it a caper film? Well, you can see from the details
above that it isn't exactly Topkapi, or The Sting, or The Thomas Crown
Affair, or even Ocean's 11. So what the hell is it?

I do agree with the critics that it was great fun to see
Gandhi spew expletives for 25 minutes in a row, and Kingsley did bring a
violent insanity to the role, but that was also tedious after the
initial shock value of it wore off. I saw this film in the theater last
summer, and my son had to wake me up at one point because I was snoring.
And then he fell asleep about 15 minutes later! Not that it mattered. We
were pretty much the only ones in the theater.

I didn't have much better luck this time with the
DVD. I really had to fight with my instinct to reach for that remote.

One thing I didn't mention. There is a surrealistic
sub-plot about Ray and his friends hunting rabbits (unsuccessfully) in
Spain, followed by Ray's daydreams about a giant charred rabbit (a man
in a burnt rabbit suit) coming back to shoot him. No comment. I think
you can determine whether that represents your kind of entertainment.

The movie isn't a piece of dog-flop. The director shows
a lot of style for a first-timer, and Gandhi did provide some
impressive pit-bull ferocity, but the script just wasn't there.

with their dollars ... did about a
million dollars in the UK, and about seven million in the
US.

IMDb
guideline: 7.5 usually indicates a level of
excellence, about like three and a half stars
from the critics. 6.0 usually indicates lukewarm
watchability, about like two and a half stars
from the critics. The fives are generally not
worthwhile unless they are really your kind of
material, about like two stars from the critics.
Films under five are generally awful even if you
like that kind of film, equivalent to about one
and a half stars from the critics or less,
depending on just how far below five the rating
is.

My own
guideline: A means the movie is so good it
will appeal to you even if you hate the genre. B means the movie is not
good enough to win you over if you hate the
genre, but is good enough to do so if you have an
open mind about this type of film. C means it will only
appeal to genre addicts, and has no crossover
appeal. D means you'll hate it even if you
like the genre. E means that you'll hate it even if
you love the genre. F means that the film is not only
unappealing across-the-board, but technically
inept as well.

Based on this
description, this film is a C-. Great acting on display, and a
highly stylized visual sense, but one of the most boring films
I've ever tried to watch. Only infinite repetition stretches
this razor-thin 30 minute script to feature length.